#KosovoChangeMakers: Lessons from Europe’s Youngest Country

Kosovo’s greatest resource is easily overlooked. Most conversations about the country start with what it lacks: an effective justice system, a reliable energy supply, a thriving private sector — not to mention diplomatic recognition from around half of UN member states.

These narratives ignore a powerful and unique resource that Kosovo does have — its young people. With around 50% of its population aged under 25, Kosovo is Europe’s youngest country.

Last year international headlines reported a youth exodus from Kosovo as many young people, faced with a 60% youth unemployment rate, left to seek opportunities abroad. But my experience working there with university students this summer told an different story altogether.

I had a chance to spend a week with twenty-odd twenty-somethings during Kosovo Changemakers, a series of lectures and workshops designed to ‘revive the hope of future leaders’. The programme was organised by Into the Park, an NGO which hosts an annual music festival in the mountainside town of Peja, and Indira Kartallozi, a UK-based social entrepreneur who is herself a native of Peja.

In fact, the attendees wouldn’t have looked out of place at any of the big UK festivals this summer. With astounding fluency in English and a knowledge of international affairs that I struggled to keep up with, it’s difficult to believe many of them hadn’t already spent a decent period of time abroad. With near ubiquitous visa requirements for travel outside the Balkans, however, most of their English was apparently learned from the internet.

The sessions on sustainability, leadership and social enterprise drew a diverse crowd of university students and recent graduates from a surprising range of disciplines, including medicine and computer science as well as business management and architecture.

Many attendees had applied to take part in the programme because of the sustainability lectures delivered by Dr Wayne Visser of the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership. Sustainability is a hot topic in Kosovo, given that the country is still being (very literally) rebuilt following the breakup of Yugoslavia and the conflict of 1999. Many young people are eager to shape the development of the country’s economy and infrastructure — to ensure that investment is channeled into renewable energy and eco-tourism rather than coal plants and ski resorts.

The session on leadership was led by Indira, a human rights activist and forced migration expert whose projects include the recently-launched Migrant Entrepreneurs Network. Indira’s workshops were designed to give participants the inspiration and confidence to take ownership of the challenges in their communities and mobilize others to act with them.

The introduction to social enterprise was run by myself and SocialStarters, the organization which brought me to social enterprise in the first place. While the legal form of social enterprise continues to be debated in the Kosovan parliament, there is a growing interest in finding ways to move beyond the country’s pervasive NGO culture.

The prevalence of international development agencies, an annual budget propped up by remittances from the diaspora community and a business environment beset by corruption and red-tape are all factors which inhibit entrepreneurial thinking in Kosovo.

Yet there is a growing recognition that relying on government funding or NGO grants to run social or environmental initiatives is not sustainable — especially as that pool of funding dries up. Our mission was to convince our audience that if they connected their social activism with an entrepreneurial mindset the impact would be far greater.

With just one day to fit in a training programme that usually takes five to deliver, we had to focus on the essentials. After an introduction to the global social enterprise movement and a look at some local case studies, we dived straight in to design thinking principles and the importance of identifying and testing assumptions.

One of our exercises was about taking a huge, daunting problem and breaking it down into smaller, more tangible issues. Starting with high-level issues such as youth unemployment, widespread environmental pollution or social marginalisation, it’s easy to feel defeated before you’ve even begun. We encouraged the participants to brainstorm all the different aspects to these problems, choose one, and use that as their starting point instead.

24 hours later on the programme’s final morning we heard pitches back from teams with ideas for a T-shirt business funding veterinary care for stray dogs, a plastics recycling business providing employment for ethnic minorities and a solar energy provider connecting homeowners to micro-finance.

Despite the variety of issues and models within the pitches, it was great to see they all shared one thing in common — starting small. And it was during one conversation with one of the participants that I realised that, in the current climate, this was a particularly important message to bring back home with me.

Errita Zuna, a 21 year-old architecture student at Pristina University, applied to take part in the programme because of the sustainability angle. Like many young Kosovans Errita sees waste and pollution as the country’s biggest environmental problem.

Errita planned to attend an ecology workshop in Romania shortly afterwards so that she could bring back new ideas and tools to start her own workshops during the EcoWeek conference in Pristina. She told me that for her, workshops were a way of introducing a very basic but powerful idea: this could be better, we don’t have to accept this.

“We can create a little world that we really want to live in, and that little world will grow. The more people get involved, the more action will start and the more you can see the difference. The moment you see the difference, you get inspired — and that’s when big projects start and develop.”

“If we create something where people understand they can actually do it, they’ll start to ask — why don’t we do it? They’ll see that we can live green. Living green is better for us. It’s going to help us develop into a better country.”

I went to Kosovo as much to learn as I did to teach. Recently, more and more of us here in western Europe are experiencing the numbing sensation of powerlessness. The rise of isolationism, intolerance and polarisation — these problems seem too big for any one person, or group of people, to be able to make a difference.

Spending a week with the future leaders of Europe’s youngest country gave me hope. We need to break down these abstract issues into problems that we can pick up and take apart. We need to stop agonising about the concepts and the terminology and start testing ideas using what we have around us.

We need to dream big, start small — and act now.